He squeezes your shoulder.
“Bow your head and close your eyes, brother.”
You do so. You should have drunk more water this morning. Your mouth is desert-dry, and the sun feels like a flamethrower. You’re dizzy.
“God gave us a way past pain. He gave it to us, two thousand years ago, and that way is Jesus Christ.”
“Amen,” “Amen,” “Amen.”
“Ain’t that right, Keeper? Now you know, son. God wants a relationship with us. If we come closer to Him, He comes closer to us. Trust in Him, Keeper. Repent. Turn away from your sins. You feel that?”
You nod, even though you feel nothing but hot and tired.
“Feel it in every muscle and nerve in your body. Let God touch you now. Repeat after me: Let the Holy Spirit come upon me now.”
“Let the Holy Spirit come upon me now,” you say.
“God, let the Holy Spirit take these evil things out of my life.”
“God, let the Holy Spirit take these evil things out of my life,” you say.
“Let me be saved, Lord.”
“Let me be saved, Lord,” you say.
“And having been saved, Lord, let me be born again.”
“And having been saved, Lord, let me be born again,” you whisper.
And then you feel something. From your head to your toes, you feel it, a light you cannot name, dusky but forever warm. The reverend continues.
“Let the Holy Spirit touch him right now. You spirits of rejection and loss and addiction, be gone. Fill him with your power, Lord. Fill him with the power to accomplish, to love. Take one breath, son.”
At the command, your lungs fill of their own accord.
“Feel that. That’s the glory of God. Evil spirits, get out of this man’s life. You’re here with him now, Lord. You know his struggles. All the depression, all the loneliness, all the sorrow—let God take that away.”
You can feel what has always been there but you’ve long ignored: an infinite sadness. With you all day, every day of your life. And when you open your eyes, you’re weeping, but you don’t know how long you’ve been doing so. A sob comes groaning out of your throat. Your life has always scared you.
“I’m sorry,” you say.
“Don’t be sorry. You feel that? That’s Jesus Christ. He’s here with you right now. He’s beside you.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” you repeat as the tears run down your face and drip from your chin into the grass. You feel why you got that cross tattooed on your arm in the first place.
“This grass will get its rain now. Those tears are the love of Christ, Keeper. That’s the love of Christ.”
The amens echo all around. When the sobs die down in your chest, when you can finally bring yourself to look up and around, when you can finally bring your arm to your face and clear your eyes of the tears, you see Raquel, holding Toby, wiping her own tears from her sweet brown cheeks.
The reverend pulls you to your feet. People are clapping and cheering.
“How was that?” he asks with a laugh. You laugh too.
“Good,” you say.
As people cheer louder, the reverend pulls you into his arms. He says into your ear, “You let God do that to you all the time. As much as you need it. It’ll keep you away from everything: the booze, the drugs, the hate. You let Jesus Christ into your life, and you don’t need nothing else. Now go see your family.”
You turn from the reverend and the spot of dry grass where you’re sure your life just changed and go to Raquel and your son. You pull them into an embrace, Raquel laying her forehead against your cheek, both of you still weeping. Toby reaches up and touches your tears, curious about what could make his father do what he does when he’s hungry or peed himself. When you open your eyes the light is different, as if it’s refracting through a dragonfly’s parchment wings.
That night you wake to a fearsome noise in the distance. As percussive as thunder, but lower and deeper. You sit up and look around. “Did you hear that?” you ask Raquel. She mumbles that she didn’t hear anything. You remember what happened to you in the grass the day before. For the first time in as long as you can remember, you are awake and you don’t think about getting high. You lower your head back to your pillow and put your arm around the woman you will someday find a way to make your wife.
When you’re out of bed in the morning, Raquel is flipping a light switch back and forth. “Power’s out again. Wasn’t a storm yesterday, though.”
You dress, get Toby fed, eat your cereal, and walk to the front door. You marvel that you have a home now. There was a time when you didn’t, but now you do. And you managed that without this new power. You open the screen door. The wood of this door is warped, so it always squeaks and rattles when it pops out of the frame. This seems like a miracle now.
“Oh my Lord,” Raquel says from the kitchen. You wander back in. She’s looking at her phone. “Know that noise you heard?”
“Yeah?”
“Must’ve been the power plant up in Tuscarawas. There was an explosion last night.” She holds up her phone. You can see a small picture of the Tuscarawas station, black smoke billowing from a hole in the guts of the structure, a redbrick wall fallen to rubble. Fire trucks streaming jets of water into the dark, smoldering wound. Without the AC units working, the day’s heat begins to creep in. Raquel looks at her phone again. “This here says it was a bomb.”
The Washington Post
SUNDAY REVIEW | NEWS ANALYSIS
A Political Storm Blows Washington Hard Right
By HazelHorizon Political Analytics
September 1, 2030
TERRORISM, White House resignations, and civil war within the GOP—all part and parcel of this strange and volatile summer—have sent Washington’s weathervane into a tailspin.
With two months to go before midterm elections, President Mary Randall’s party appears to be in open revolt, which has led the White House to shift priorities from energy and climate legislation to border control and national security.
The recalibration began in July with the “Ohio River Massacre,” when truck bombs exploded outside three coal-fired power stations in Ohio and Kentucky, destroying generating capacity. Though the bombings produced no fatalities, they left two million people without power at the height of a record-breaking heat wave. A domestic terrorist network claimed responsibility. Public health officials estimate that at least thirty-four people died of heat-related effects across six Midwestern states during the periods of blackout, although whether these deaths could have been avoided is impossible to say.
Then this past week, President Randall canceled an event in Iowa after the Department of Homeland Security received credible intelligence of another domestic terror plot. Arrests were made of nine individuals with ties to the antigovernment extremist group the Hawkeye Brigade. The FBI and the Iowa attorney general have outlined felony domestic terrorism charges against the seven men and two women involved.
These plots, motivated by different ideological programs, are not being treated with equal severity. The eco-saboteurs known as “the Weathermen,” in reference to the radical leftist group of the 1970s, has set both political parties on their heels, crippled what remains of the coal industry, and ignited a mutiny within the Randall administration, leading to the resignation of Secretary of Defense R. Holden Jons. In a statement explaining his departure, Jons took the unusual step of fiercely criticizing the president for her failure to confront “Islamic radicalism, narco-terrorists, and eco-fascists.” Similar defections have followed among congressional Republicans, and Randall’s most vociferous rival, West Virginia senator Russ Mackowski, continues to call on the president to resign.
Caught in the center of this storm is the hotly contested climate bill. The president and Senate Republicans face enormous pressure to scrap the year-and-a-half effort to pass LaFray-Kastor, also known as the Pollution Reduction, Infrastructure, and Refund Act.